Pilsen photographer takes intergenerational group through LGBTQ+ history — and adds them to it

Diana Solís, a photojournalist and artist from Pilsen, used to take pictures of her friends doing anything from laying in bed to taking part in revolutionary LGBTQ+ marches in Chicago and Mexico City.

Several of them have been hanging on the walls of the Chicago Cultural Center since the spring, as part of the exhibit “Images on Which to Build,” which features snapshots of the LGBTQ+ liberation movement from the '70s to '90s and runs until Aug. 4.

“I didn’t think I was immortalizing things at the time,” Solís, 68, told the Sun-Times.

She got to be a bridge for generations in her community Friday, taking fellow alumni of the LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project on a personal tour through the exhibit that featured the history older members lived through and the foundation for the younger members. .

“[The dialogue project] is so important because we have different generations coming together to support each other,” Solís said of the dialogue project, a partnership between the Center on Halsted's senior services center, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Chicago that aims to connect young queer people to their elders in order to preserve their shared history.

"That unity and communication is much needed," she said. "It helps us to go through our lives, no matter where we’re at on the age spectrum."

The display features Solís’ work, as well as many of her contemporaries. Lola Flash, who used cross-color processing to help conceal identities while capturing queer intimacy and scenes from the AIDS epidemic, and Joan E. Biren, or JEB — who toured the country in the late '70s and early '80s with her slideshow "The Dyke Show," which featured a century of photography from a "lesbian-feminist perspective" — both had dedicated parts of the exhibit.

Solís said the exhibition reuniting the intergenerational group gave them the "sense that we need to be together." It served as a reminder of what can be accomplished through uniting whole swaths of people in the LGBTQ+ community.

After giving the tour, Solís stopped to take their portraits together — adding the group, and the bonds they’ve made, to her body of work. Molly Fulup, a 25-year-old graduate research assistant for the dialogue project and current doctoral student at the University of Illinois Chicago, took a few moments during the shoot to take their own pictures as well.

They said they were inspired to follow their academic path studying queer art and history after seeing an exhibit similar to the one they were touring Friday.

“This is what we are fighting for,” Fulup said. “This is our chance to add to that archive and continue building on that history so 20 or 30 years from now, we can have exhibitions like this or share our own photos that say ‘We were here and we were queer.’”

Solís spent decades capturing communities on a camera, diving back into photography during the pandemic to check in on the state of the neighborhood she grew up in. She said it’s important to capture communities in her art as a way to present their struggles — but also to educate others while humanizing them.

She said art like this is needed “more than ever.”

“I always had this fear in the back of my mind because we encounter this fear and prejudice every day of our lives,” Solís said. “Today more than ever, we need to stay together and educate as much as possible. … Photography and other art create ways for people to create change in their lives.”

Phyllis Johnson, a 73-year-old Roseland resident and member of the dialogue group, was excited to see a poster for Amigas Latinas, a queer advocacy organization founded by Johnson’s friends , as part of the exhibit.

What touched her most, though, was the “celebration” of queerness in the art.

She said she’s still hesitant to tell people about her sexuality — but here there was “no hiding."

“Walking through, it’s so affirming,” Johnson, a member of the Illinois Commission on LGBTQ Aging, said. “Society kept that awareness pushed down for me, so to be in a place that celebrates that, this is it. … There’s no keeping secrets.”